Gangsters in Dinner Suits

A very good friend of mine, once, coined the phrase "gangsters in dinner suits" during a conversation about the hierarchy of HA and who you should worry about more... The "face" that you see or the people behind the scenes who actually run it all.... probable a mute point though as upsetting either will end badly...

With all this facebook twittering going on lately about the election's lost and misprinted ballot forms I feel that the term more than applies to the present "system".

Were there more errors than with previous elections is the first question to ask and, I suppose, who gained the most from those lost/ spoilt papers is the second....

My days at the Corn Exchange in the early 80's brought me into contact with local council members regularly and it never ceased to amaze me how much info they left laying around after a meeting.... Rejected ideas/ plans in the waste bins and they rarely removed the used flip board pages.

I do remember some eye opening info about the Ipswich airport.... plans and strategies.... and even, once, a stack of files left on a meeting desk that had 316 Clapgate lane on it.... which is the house I grew up in...  So wanted to look but who knows if they were left there as a test or what the repercussions would have been if I was found reading them...

Did you know that Crown pools should have had a separate high diving pool at the back.... but funding "changed" (read that how you will) and it was not built.....

The really interesting bit is that one of the guys building the pools asked a councillor where the toilets were..... this was about two weeks before the official pools opening...... There wasn't any.... they were all in the high diving area...... which was not longer being build..... talk about headless chickens.....

Anyone who knows the pools knows then toilets are a bit oddly shaped..... that's because they were originally designed as storage rooms... The beer cellar ended up in the pump room... bit warm in there...

Anyway as to the title of the blog...

Is it, now, what you see you should be worried about.... for whoever appears to be running the country its only a guideline for a perceived direction... The underlying big brother (or should that be big business) strategy is far more dangerous to the freedom we think we have.

The people behind the scene, the advisers, those with "invested" interests or those who crave power are the ones you should worry about as while there's a profit to be made at someone elses expense then all is good but when the plan fails, or the countries broke, they will be the first to leave without so much  as a backward glance or care..... not my fault....

As we are so far down this line now all any government can do is rob Peter to pay Paul..... at every level....

If you go back to when the photo card part of the driving license was issued.... There was lots of noise about your driving licence being, and always will be, free...
               when they brought in the photo card.....
                                      that only lasted 10 years....
                                                         and then you pay for the renewal....
This was, so little, mentioned at the time that 10 years later there's a lot of people driving about without a valid card..... Que the governments usual comment... you should have know this...

And now were going to lose the "paper" part altogether... so the driving licence is no longer "free"....  something that's not mentioned at all now....

Car tax disc's.... people do have short memories but its always been the case that if the seller kept/ refunded the tax then the new owner had to tax back to the beginning of the month.... so that's months tax was paid twice....

Now its a mainstream event everybody going "hang on a minute"... Apparently the government has gotten really nasty on this one with instant fine letters going out for hundreds of pounds and a huge rise in clamping for , so called, untaxed vehicles..... even when the fault has been caused by the DVLA itself....

You're not telling me that they can send out an instant refund or fine and can't work out how to refund tax on a daily (not monthly) basis.... I can understand a monthly basis for the paper disc but as the new electronic system has a button refunds by month.... how hard can it be to refund by day..... after all its just a number.... x of 12 used or x of 365 used..... "she canne handle it capan....."

The statement that the money is used to pay for the speedy refund process... well how much does a cheque and postage actually cost the government... I would doubt if 2% of the new revenues total (read tax on tax) was used in the refund process

I will say, and stand by it, if everyone refused to pay car tax..... will they fine the lot of us... NO

Car tax has been become a tool to persuade people to buy new cars but ,hay, if you want to ride round in that old gas guzzler we'll charge you for it....

Stick the tax on fuel....the more miles you do, or the less mpg the vehicle does, the more you pay.... simples.... and you then don't need the staff who sort out the tax/ sorn etc so government jobs gone that don't affect services, hospitals and elderly care......

God this is turning into a rant......

So.....

VAT call it what it is... a blanket tax........   a state tax......

The government slimmed down the public sector staff recently and let go a lot of sorely needed staff... Why didn't they drop the VAT to, say, 8% and no one can claim it back....

And then you could have sacked most of the VAT staff that everybody hates anyway..... business's could sack the highly paid people who work out how not to pay tax.... the government has more money...everyone, effectively, has more money in the bank to spend..... its a win win scenario.... 

Never happen though as again the "gangsters in dinner suits" want more than you have...
                                           (and yes I have written that right)